This book explains why we need to make some very specific educational
changes in order to achieve a higher level of national literacy. It does
not anatomize the literacy crisis or devote many pages to Scholastic Aptitude
Test scores. It does not document at length what has already been established,
that Americans do not read as well as they should. It takes no position
about methods of initial reading instruction beyond insisting that content
must receive as much emphasis as 'skill.' It does not discuss
teacher training or educational funding or school governance. In fact, one
of its major purposes is to break away entirely from what Jeanne S. Chall
has called 'the great debate' about methods of reading instruction.
It focuses on what I conceive to be the great hidden problem in American
education, and I hope that it reveals this problem so compellingly that
anyone who is concerned about American education will be persuaded by the
book's argument and act upon it.

The standard of literacy required by modern society has been rising throughout
the developed world, but American literacy rates have not risen to meet
this standard. What seemed an acceptable level in the 1950s is no longer
acceptable in the late 1980s, when only highly literate societies can prosper
economically. Much of Japan's industrial efficiency has been credited to
its almost universally high level of literacy. But in the United States,
only two thirds of our citizens are literate, and even among those the average
level is too low and should be raised. The remaining third of our citizens
need to be brought as close to true literacy as possible. Ultimately our
aim should be to attain universal literacy at a very high level, to achieve
not only greater economic prosperity but also greater social justice and
more effective democracy. We Americans have long accepted literacy as a
paramount aim of schooling, but only recently have some of us who have done
research in the field begun to realize that literacy is far more than a
skill and that it requires large amounts of specific information. That new
insight is central to this book.

Professor Chall is one of several reading specialists who have observed
that 'world knowledge' is essential to the development of reading
and writing skills. What she calls world knowledge I call cultural literacy,
namely, the network of information that all competent readers possess. It
is the background information, stored in their minds, that enables them
to take up a newspaper and read it with an adequate level of comprehension,
getting the point, grasping the implications, relating what they read to
the unstated context which alone gives meaning to what they read. In describing
the contents of this neglected domain of background information, I try to
direct attention to a new opening that can help our schools make the significant
improvement in education that has so far eluded us. The achievement of high
universal literacy is the key to all other fundamental improvements in American
education.

Why is literacy so important in the modern world? Some of the reasons,
like the need to fill out forms or get a good job, are so obvious that they
needn't be discussed. But the chief reason is broader. The complex undertakings
of modern life depend on the cooperation of many people with different specialties
in different places. Where communications fail, so do the undertakings.
(That is the moral of the story of the Tower of Babel.) The function of
national literacy is to foster effective nationwide communications. Our
chief instrument of communication over time and space is the standard national
language, which is sustained by national literacy. Mature literacy alone
enables the tower to be built, the business to be well managed, and the
airplane to fly without crashing. All nationwide communications, whether
by telephone, radio, TV, or writing are fundamentally dependent upon literacy,
for the essence of literacy is not simply reading and writing but also the
effective use of the standard literate language. In Spain and most of Latin
America the literate language is standard written Spanish. In Japan it is
standard written Japanese. In our country it is standard written English.

Linguists have used the term 'standard written English,' to describe
both our written and spoken language, because they want to remind us that
standard spoken English is based upon forms that have been fixed in dictionaries
and grammars and are adhered to in books, magazines, and newspapers. Although
standard written English has no intrinsic superiority to other languages
and dialects, its stable written forms have now standardized the oral forms
of the language spoken by educated Americans. The chief function of literacy
is to make us masters of this standard instrument of knowledge and communication, thereby enabling us to give and receive complex information orally and in writing over time and space. Advancing technology, with its constant need for host and complex communications, has made literacy ever more essential to commerce and domestic life. The literate language is more, not less, central in our society now than it was in the days before television and
the silicon chip.

The recently rediscovered insight that literacy is more than a skill
is based upon knowledge that all of us unconsciously have about language.
We know instinctively that to understand what somebody is saying, we must
understand more than the surface meanings of words; we have to understand
the context as well. The need for background information applies all the
more to reading and writing. To grasp the words on a page we have to know
a lot of information that isn't set down on the page.

Consider the implications of the following experiment described in an
article in Scientific American. A researcher goes to Harvard Square in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a tape recorder hidden in his coat pocket.
Putting a copy of the Boston Globe under his arm, he pretends to be a native.
He says to passersby, 'How do you get to Central Square?' The
passersby, thinking they are addressing a fellow Bostonian, don't even break
their stride when they give their replies, which consist of a few words
like 'First stop on the subway.'

The next day the researcher goes to the same spot, but this time he presents
himself as a tourist, obviously unfamiliar with the city. 'I'm from
out of town,' he says. 'Can you tell me how to get to Central
Square?' This time the tapes show that people's answers are much longer
and more rudimentary. A typical one goes, 'Yes, well you go down on
the subway. You can see the entrance over there, and when you get downstairs
you buy a token, put it in the slot, and you go over to the side that says
Quincy. You take the train headed for Quincy, but you get off very soon,
just the first stop is Central Square, and be sure you get off there. You'll
know it because there's a big sign on the wall. It says Central Square.'
And so on.

Passersby were intuitively aware that communication between strangers
requires an estimate of how much relevant information can be taken for granted
in the other person. If they can take a lot for granted, their communications
can be short and efficient, subtle and complex. But if strangers share very
little knowledge, their communications must be long and relatively rudimentary.

In order to put in perspective the importance of background knowledge
in language, I want to connect the lack of it with our recent lack of success
in teaching mature literacy to all students. The most broadly based evidence
about our teaching of literacy comes from the National Assessment of Educational
Progress (NAEP). This nationwide measurement, mandated by Congress, shows
that between 1970 and 1980 seventeen year-olds declined in their ability to
understand written materials, and the decline was especially striking in
the top group, those able to read at an 'advanced' level. Although
these scores have now begun to rise, they remain alarmingly low. Still more
precise quantitative data have come from the scores of the verbal Scholastic
Aptitude Test (SAT). According to John B. Carroll, a distinguished psychometrician,
the verbal SAT is essentially a test of 'advanced vocabulary knowledge,'
which makes it a fairly sensitive instrument for measuring levels of literacy.
It is well known that verbal SAT scores have declined dramatically in the
past fifteen years, and though recent reports have shown them rising again,
it is from a very low base. Moreover, performance on the verbal SAT has
been slipping steadily at the top. Ever fewer numbers of our best and brightest
students are making high scores on the test.

Decline of Literate Knowledge

Before the College Board disclosed the full statistics in 1984, anti-alarmists
could argue that the fall in average verbal scores could be explained by
the rise in the number of disadvantaged students taking the SATs. That argument
can no longer be made. It's now clear that not only our disadvantaged but
also our best educated and most talented young people are showing diminished
verbal skills. To be precise, out of a constant pool of about a million
test takers each year, 56 percent more students scored above 600 in 1974
than did so in 1984. More startling yet, the percentage drop was even greater
for those scoring above 650-73 percent.

In the mid 1980s American business leaders have become alarmed by the
lack of communication skills in the young people they employ. Recently,
top executives of some large U.S. companies, including CBS and Exxon, met
to discuss the fact that their younger middle-level executives could no longer
communicate their ideas effectively in speech or writing. This group of
companies has made a grant to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
to analyze the causes of this growing problem. They want to know why, despite
breathtaking advances in the technology of communication, the effectiveness
of business communication has been slipping, to the detriment of our competitiveness
in the world. The figures from NAEP surveys and the scores on the verbal
SAT are solid evidence that literacy has been declining in this country
just when our need for effective literacy has been sharply rising.

I now want to juxtapose some evidence for another kind of educational
decline, one that is related to the drop in literacy. During the period
1970­1985, the amount of shared knowledge that we have been able to
take for granted in communicating with our fellow citizens has also been
declining. More and more of our young people don't know things we used to
assume they knew.

A side effect of the diminution in shared information has been a noticeable
increase in the number of articles in such publications as Newsweek and
the Wall Street Journal about the surprising ignorance of the young. My
son John, who recently taught Latin in high school and eighth grade, often
told me of experiences which indicate that these articles are not exaggerated.
In one of his classes he mentioned to his students that Latin, the language
they were studying, is a dead language that is no longer spoken. After his
pupils had struggled for several weeks with Latin grammar and vocabulary,
this news was hard for some of them to accept. One girl raised her hand
to challenge my son's claim. 'What do they speak in Latin America?'
she demanded.

At least she had heard of Latin America. Another day my son asked his
Latin class if they knew the name of an epic poem by Homer. One pupil shot
up his hand and eagerly said, 'The Alamo!' Was it just a slip
for The Iliad? No, he didn't know what the Alamo was, either. To judge from
other stories about information gaps in the young, many American schoolchildren
are less well informed than this pupil. The following, by Benjamin J. Stein,
is an excerpt from one of the most evocative recent accounts of youthful
ignorance.

I spend a lot of time with teen-agers. Besides employing three of them
part-time, I frequently conduct focus groups at Los Angeles area high schools
to learn about teen-agers' attitudes towards movies or television shows
or nuclear arms or politicians....

I have not yet found one single student in Los Angeles, in either college
or high school, who could tell me the years when World War 11 was fought.
Nor have I found one who could tell me the years when World War I was fought.
Nor have I found one who knew when the American Civil War was fought....

A few have known how many U.S. senators California has, but none has
known how many Nevada or Oregon has. ('Really? Even though they're
so small?') . . . Only two could tell me where Chicago is, even in
the vaguest terms. (My particular favorite geography lesson was the junior
at the University of California at Los Angeles who thought that Toronto
must be in Italy. My second-favorite geography lesson is the junior at USC,
a pre-law student, who thought that Washington, D.C. was in Washington State.)
. . .

Only two could even approximately identify Thomas Jefferson. Only one
could place the date of the Declaration of Independence. None could name
even one of the first ten amendments to the Constitution or connect them
with the Bill of Rights....

On and on it went. On and on it goes. I have mixed up episodes of ignorance
of facts with ignorance of concepts because it seems to me that there is
a connection.... The kids I saw (and there may be lots of others who are
different) are not mentally prepared to continue the society because they
basically do not understand the society well enough to value it.

My son assures me that his pupils are not ignorant. They know a great
deal. Like every other human group they share a tremendous amount of knowledge
among themselves, much of it learned in school. The trouble is that, from
the standpoint of their literacy and their ability to communicate with others
in our culture, what they know is ephemeral and narrowly confined to their
own generation. Many young people strikingly lack the information that writers
of American books and newspapers have traditionally taken for granted among
their readers from all generations. For reasons explained in this book,
our children's lack of intergenerational information is a serious problem
for the nation. The decline of literacy and the decline of shared knowledge
are closely related, interdependent facts.

The evidence for the decline of shared knowledge is not just anecdotal.
In 1978 NAEP issued a report which analyzed a large quantity of data showing
that our children's knowledge of American civics had dropped significantly
between 1969 and 1976 The performance of thirteen year-olds had dropped an
alarming 11 percentage points. That the drop has continued since 1976 was
confirmed by preliminary results from a NAEP study conducted in late 1985.
It was undertaken both because of concern about declining knowledge and
because of the growing evidence of a causal connection between the drop
in shared information and in literacy. The Foundations of Literacy project
is measuring some of the specific information about history and literature
that American seventeen year olds possess.

Although the full report will not be published until 1987, the preliminary
field tests are disturbingly If these samplings hold up, and there is no
reason to think they will not, then the results we will be reading in 1987
will show that two thirds of our seventeen year-olds do not know that the
Civil War occurred between 1850 and 1900. Three-quarters do not know what
reconstruction means. Half do not know the meaning of Brown decision and
cannot identify either Stalin or Churchill. Three quarters are unfamiliar
with the names of standard American and British authors. Moreover, our seventeen year-olds
have little sense of geography or the relative chronology of major events.
Reports of youthful ignorance can no longer be considered merely impressionistic.

My encounter in the seventies with this widening knowledge gap first
caused me to recognize the connection between specific background knowledge
and mature literacy. The research I was doing on the reading and writing
abilities of college students made me realize two things.' First, we cannot
assume that young people today know things that were known in the past by
almost every literate person in the culture. For instance, in one experiment
conducted in Richmond, Virginia, our seventeen and eighteen year old subjects
did not know who Grant and Lee were. Second, our results caused me to realize
that we cannot treat reading and writing as empty skills, independent of
specific knowledge. The reading skill of a person may vary greatly from
task to task. The level of literacy exhibited in each task depends on the
relevant background information that the person possesses.

The lack of wide ranging background information among young men and women
now in their twenties and thirties is an important cause of the illiteracy
that large corporations are finding in their middle-level executives. In
former days, when business people wrote and spoke to one another, they could
be confident that they and their colleagues had studied many similar things
in school. They could talk to one another with an efficiency similar to
that of native Bostonians who speak to each other in the streets of Cambridge.
But today's high school graduates do not reliably share much common information,
even when they graduate from the same school. If young people meet as strangers,
their communications resemble the uncertain, rudimentary explanations recorded
in the second part of the Cambridge experiment.

My father used to write business letters that alluded to Shakespeare.
These allusions were effective for conveying complex messages to his associates,
because, in his day, business people could make such allusions with every
expectation of being understood. For instance, in my father's commodity
business, the timing of sales and purchases was all-important, and he would
sometimes write or say to his colleagues, 'There is a tide,' without
further elaboration. Those four words carried not only a lot of complex
information, but also the persuasive force of a proverb. In addition to
the basic practical meaning, 'Act now!,' what came across was a lot
of implicit reasons why immediate action was important.

For some of my younger readers who may not recognize the allusion, the
passage from Julius Caesar is:

There is a tide in the affairs of men Which taken at the flood leads
on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows
and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take
the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.

To say 'There is a tide' is better than saying 'Buy (or
sell) now and you'll cover expenses for the whole year, but if you fail
to act right away, you may regret it the rest of your life.,' That would
be twenty-seven words instead of four, and while the bare message of the
longer statement would be conveyed, the persuasive force wouldn't. Think
of the demands of such a business communication. To persuade somebody that
your recommendation is wise and well-founded, you have to give lots of reasons
and cite known examples and authorities. My father accomplished that and
more in four words, which made quoting Shakespeare as effective as any efficiency
consultant could wish. The moral of this tale is not that reading Shakespeare
will help one rise in the business world. My point is a broader one. The
fact that middle-level executives no longer share literate background knowledge
is a chief cause of their inability to communicate effectively.

THE NATURE AND USE OF CULTURAL LITERACY

The documented decline in shared knowledge carries implications that
go far beyond the shortcomings of executives and extend to larger questions
of educational policy and social justice in our country. Mina Shaughnessy
was a great English teacher who devoted her professional life to helping
disadvantaged students become literate. At the 1980 conference dedicated
to her memory, one of the speakers who followed me to the podium was the
Harvard historian and sociologist Orlando Patterson. To my delight he departed
from his prepared talk to mention mine. He seconded my argument that shared
information is a necessary background to true literacy. Then he extended
and deepened the ideas I had presented. Here is what Professor Patterson
said, as recorded in the Proceedings of the conference.

Industrialized civilization [imposes] a growing cultural and structural
complexity which requires persons to have a broad grasp of what Professor
Hirsch has called cultural literacy: a deep understanding of mainstream
culture, which no longer has much to do with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants,
but with the imperatives of industrial civilization. It is the need for
cultural literacy, a profound conception of the whole civilization, which
is often neglected in talk about literacy.

Patterson continued by drawing a connection between background information
and the ability to hold positions of responsibility and power. He was particularly
concerned with the importance for blacks and other minorities of possessing
this information, which is essential for improving their social and economic
status.

The people who run society at the macro level must be literate in this
culture. For this reasons it is dangerous to overemphasize the problems
of basic literacy or the relevancy of literacy to specific tasks, and more
constructive to emphasize that blacks will be condemned in perpetuity to
oversimplified, low level tasks and will never gain their rightful place
in controlling the levers of power unless they also acquire literacy in
this wider cultural sense.

Although Patterson focused his remarks on the importance of cultural
literacy for minorities, his observations hold for every culturally illiterate
person in our nation. Indeed, as he observed, cultural literacy is not the
property of any group or class.

To assume that this wider culture is static is an error; in fact it is
not. It's not a WASP culture; it doesn't belong to any group. It is essentially
and constantly changing, and it is open. What is needed is recognition that
the accurate metaphor or model for this wider literacy is not domination,
but dialectic; each group participates and contributes, transforms and is
transformed, as much as any other group.... The English language no longer
belongs to any single group or nation. The same goes for any other area
of the wider culture.

As Professor Patterson suggested, being taught to decode elementary reading
materials and specific, job related texts cannot constitute true literacy.
Such basic training does not make a person literate with respect to newspapers
or other writings addressed to a general public. Moreover, a directly practical
drawback of such narrow training is that it does not prepare anyone for
technological change. Narrow vocational training in one state of a technology
will not enable a person to read manuals that explain new developments in
the same technology. In modern life we need general knowledge that enables
us to deal with new ideas, events, and challenges. In today's world, general
cultural literacy is more useful than what Professor Patterson terms 'literacy
to a specific task,' because general literate information is the basis
for many changing tasks.

Cultural literacy is even more important in the social sphere. The aim
of universal literacy has never been a socially neutral mission in our country.
Our traditional social goals were unforgettably renewed for us by Martin
Luther King, Jr., in his 'I Have a Dream' speech. King envisioned
a country where the children of former slaves sit down at the table of equality
with the children of former slave owners, where men and women deal with
each other as equals and judge each other on their characters and achievements
rather than their origins. Like Thomas Jefferson, he had a dream of a society
founded not on race or class but on personal merit. In the present day,
that dream depends on mature literacy. No modern society can hope to become
a just society without a high level of universal literacy. Putting aside
for the moment the practical arguments about the economic uses of literacy,
we can contemplate the even more basic principle that underlies our national
system of education in the first place-that people in a democracy can be
entrusted to decide all important matters for themselves because they can
deliberate and communicate with one another. Universal literacy is inseparable
from democracy and is the canvas for Martin Luther King's picture as well
as for Thomas Jefferson's. Both of these leaders understood that just having
the right to vote is meaningless if a citizen is disenfranchised by illiteracy
or semiliteracy. Illiterate and semiliterate Americans are condemned not
only to poverty, but also to the powerlessness of incomprehension. Knowing
that they do not understand the issues, and feeling prey to manipulative
oversimplifications, they do not trust the system of which they are supposed
to be the masters. They do not feel themselves to be active participants
in our republic, and they often do not turn out to vote. The civic importance
of cultural literacy lies in the fact that true enfranchisement depends
upon knowledge, knowledge upon literacy, and literacy upon cultural literacy
To be truly literate, citizens must be able to grasp the meaning of any
piece of writing addressed to the general reader. All citizens should be
able, for instance, to read newspapers of substance, about which Jefferson
made the following famous remark:

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without
newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a
moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive
those papers and be capable of reading them.

Jefferson's last comment is often omitted when the passage is quoted,
but it's the crucial one.

Books and newspapers assume a 'common reader,' that is, a person
who knows the things known by other literate persons in the culture. Obviously,
such assumptions are never identical from writer to writer, but they show
a remarkable consistency. Those who write for a mass public are always making
judgments about what their readers can be assumed to know, and the judgments
are closely similar. Any reader who doesn't possess the knowledge assumed
in a piece he or she reads will in fact be illiterate with respect to that
particular piece of writing.

Here, for instance, is a rather typical excerpt from the Washington Post
of December 9, 1983.

A federal appeals panel today upheld an order barring foreclosure on
a Missouri farm, saying that U.S. Agriculture Secretary John R. Block has
reneged on his responsibilities to some debt ridden farmers. The appeals
panel directed the USDA to create a system of processing loan deferments
and of publicizing them as it said Congress had intended. The panel said
that it is the responsibility of the agriculture secretary to carry out
this intent 'not as a private banker, but as a public broker.'

Imagine that item being read by people who are well trained in phonics,
word recognition, and other decoding skills but are culturally illiterate.
They might know words like foreclosure, but they would not understand what
the piece means. Who gave the order that the federal panel upheld? What
is a federal appeals panel? Where is Missouri, and what about Missouri is
relevant to the issue? Why are many farmers debt ridden? What is the USDA?
What is a public broker? Even if culturally illiterate readers bothered
to look up individual words, they would have little idea of the reality
being referred to. The explicit words are just surface pointers to textual
meaning in reading and writing. The comprehending reader must bring to the
text appropriate background information that includes knowledge not only
about the topic but also the shared attitudes and conventions that color
a piece of writing.

Our children can learn this information only by being taught it. Shared
literate information is deliberately sustained by national systems of education
in many countries because they recognize the importance of giving their
children a common basis for communication. Some decades ago a charming book
called 1066 and All That appeared in Britain. It dealt with facts of British
history that all educated Britons had been taught as children but remembered
only dimly as adults. The book caricatured those recollections, purposely
getting the 'facts' just wrong enough to make them ridiculous
on their face. Readers instantly recognized that the book was mistaken in
its theory about what Ethelred-the-Unready was unready for, but, on the other
hand, they couldn't say precisely what he was unready for. The book was
hilarious to literate Britons as a satire of their own vague and confused
memories. But even if their schoolchild knowledge had become vague with
the passage of time, it was still functional, because the information essential
to literacy is rarely detailed or precise.

This haziness is a key characteristic of literacy and cultural literacy.
To understand the Washington Post extract literate readers have to know
only vaguely, in the backs of their minds, that the American legal system
permits a court decision to be reversed by a higher court. They would need
to know only that a judge is empowered to tell the executive branch what
it can or cannot do to farmers and other citizens. (The secretary of agriculture
was barred from foreclosing a Missouri farm.) Readers would need to know
only vaguely what and where Missouri is, and how the department and the
secretary of agriculture fit into the scheme of things. None of this knowledge
would have to be precise. Readers wouldn't have to know whether an appeals
panel is the final judicial level before the U.S. Supreme Court. Any practiced
writer who feels it is important for a reader to know such details always
provides them.

Much in verbal communication is necessarily vague, whether we are conversing
or reading. What counts is our ability to grasp the general shape of what
we are reading and to tie it to what we already know. If we need details,
we rely on the writer or speaker to develop them. Or if we intend to ponder
matters in detail for ourselves, we do so later, at our leisure. For instance,
it is probably true that many people do not know what a beanbag is in baseball.
So in an article on the subject the author conveniently sets forth as much
as the culturally literate reader must know.

Described variously as the knockdown pitch, the beanball, the duster
and the purpose pitch-the Pentagon would call it the peacekeeper-this delightful
stratagem has graced the scene for most of the 109 years the major leagues
have existed. It starts fights. It creates lingering grudges. It sends people
to the hospital.... 'You put my guy in the dirt, I put your guy in
the dirt.'

To understand this text, we don't have to know much about the particular
topic in advance, but we do require quite a lot of vague knowledge about
baseball to give us a sense of the whole meaning, whether our knowledge
happens to be vague or precise.

The superficiality of the knowledge we need for reading and writing may
be unwelcome news to those who deplore superficial learning and praise critical
thinking over mere information. But one of the sharpest critical thinkers
of our day, Dr. Hilary Putnam, a Harvard philosopher, has provided us with
a profound insight into the importance of vague knowledge in verbal communication

Suppose you are like me and cannot tell an elm from a beech tree....
[I can nonetheless use the word 'elm' because] there is a division
of linguistic labor.... It is not at all necessary or efficient that everyone
who wears a gold ring (or a gold cufflink, etc.) be able to tell with any
reliability whether or not something is really gold.... Everyone to whom
the word 'gold' is important for any reason has to acquire the
word 'gold'; but he does not have to acquire the method of recognizing
if something is or is not gold.

Putnam does acknowledge a limit on the degrees of ignorance and vagueness
that are acceptable in discourse. 'Significant communication,'
he observes, 'requires that people know something of what they are
talking about.' Nonetheless, what is required for communication is
often so vague and superficial that we can properly understand and use the
word elm without being able to distinguish an elm tree from a beech tree.
What we need to know in order to use and understand a word is an initial
stereotype that has a few vague traits.

Speakers are required to know something about (stereotypic) tigers in
order to count as having acquired the word 'tiger'; something
about elm trees (or anyway about the stereotype thereof) to count as having
acquired the word 'elm,' etc.... The nature of the required minimum
level of competence depends heavily upon both the culture and the topic,
however. In our culture speakers are not ... required to know the fine details
(such as leaf shape) of what an elm tree looks like. English speakers are
required by their linguistic community to be able to tell tigers from leopards;
they are not required to be able to tell beech trees from elm trees.

When Putnam says that Americans can be depended on to distinguish tigers
and leopards but not elms and beeches, he assumes that his readers will
agree with him because they are culturally literate. He takes for granted
that one literate person knows approximately the same things as another
and is aware of the probable limits of the other person's knowledge. That
second level of awareness-knowing what others probably know-is crucial for
effective communication. In order to speak effectively to people we must
have a reliable sense of what they do and do not know. For instance, if
Putnam is right in his example, we should not have to tell a stranger that
a leopard has spots or a tiger stripes, but we would have to explain that
an elm has rough bark and a beech smooth bark if we wanted that particular
piece of information conveyed. To know what educated people know about tigers
but don't know about elm trees is the sort of cultural knowledge, limited
in extent but possessed by all literate people, that must be brought into
the open and taught to our children.

Besides being limited in extent, cultural literacy has another trait
that is important for educational policy-its national character. It's true
that literate English is an international language, but only so long as
the topics it deals with are international. The background knowledge of
people from other English speaking nations is often inadequate for complex
and subtle communications within our nation. The knowledge required for
national literacy differs from country to country, even when their national
language is the same. It is no doubt true that one layer of cultural literacy
is the same for all English speaking nations. Australians, South Africans,
Britons, and Americans share a lot of knowledge by virtue of their common
language. But much of the knowledge required for literacy in, say, Australia
is specific to that country, just as much of ours is specific to the United
States.

For instance, a literate Australian can typically understand American
newspaper articles on international events or the weather but not one on
a federal appeals panel. The same holds true for Americans who read Australian
newspapers. Many of us have heard 'Waltzing Matilda,' a song known
to every Australian, but few Americans understand or need to understand
what the words mean.

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billybong, Under the shade of a kulibar
tree, And he sang as he sat and waited for his billyboil, 'You'll come
awaltzing, Matilda, with me.'

Waltzing Matilda doesn't mean dancing with a girl; it means walking with
a kind of knapsack. A swagman is a hobo, a billybong is a brook or pond,
a kulibar is a eucalyptus, and billyboil is coffee.

The national character of the knowledge needed in reading and writing
was strikingly revealed in an experiment conducted by Richard C. Anderson
and others at the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois.
They assembled two paired groups of readers, all highly similar in sexual
balance, educational background, age, and social class. The only difference
between the groups was that one was in India, the other in the United States.
Both were given the same two letters to read. The texts were similar in
overall length, word frequency distribution, sentence length and complexity,
and number of explicit propositions. Both levers were on the same topic,
a wedding, but one described an Indian wedding, the other an American wedding.
The reading performances of the two groups-their speed and accuracy of comprehension-split
along national lines. The Indians performed well in reading about the Indian
wedding but poorly in reading about the American one, and the Americans
did the opposite. This experiment not only reconfirmed the dependence of
reading skill on cultural literacy, it also demonstrated its national character.

Although nationalism may be regrettable in some of its worldwide political
effects) a mastery of national culture is essential to mastery of the standard
language in every modern nation. This point is important for educational
policy, because educators often stress the virtues of multicultural education.
Such study is indeed valuable in itself; it inculcates tolerance and provides
a perspective on our own traditions and values. But however laudable it
is, it should not be the primary focus of national education. It should
not be allowed to supplant or interfere with our schools' responsibility
to ensure our children's mastery of American literate culture. The acculturative
responsibility of the schools is primary and fundamental. To teach the ways
of one's own community has always been and still remains the essence of
the education of our children, who enter neither a narrow tribal culture
nor a transcendent world culture but a national literate culture. For profound
historical reasons, this is the way of the modern worlds It will not change
soon, and it will certainly not be changed by educational policy alone.

THE DECLINE OF TEACHING CULTURAL LITERACY

Why have our schools failed to fulfill their fundamental acculturative
responsibility? In view of the immense importance of cultural literacy for
speaking, listening, reading, and writing, why has need for a definite,
shared body of information been so rarely mentioned in discussions of education?
In the educational writings of the past decade, I find almost nothing on
this topic, which is not arcane. People who are introduced to the subject
quickly understand why oral or written communication requires a lot of shared
background knowledge. It's not the difficult or novelty of the idea that has
caused it to receive so little attention.

Let me hazard a guess about one reason for our neglect of the subject
We have ignored cultural literacy in tong about education-certainly I as
a researcher also ignored it until recently- precisely because it was something
we have been able to take for granted. We ignore the air we breathe until
it is thin or foul. Cultural literacy is the oxygen of Social intercourse.
Only when we run into cultural illiteracy are we shocked into recognizing
the importance of the information that we bad unconsciously assumed.

To be sure, a missal level of information is possessed by any normal
person who lives in the United States and speaks elementary English. Almost
everybody knows what is meant by dollar and that cars must travel on the
right hand site of the road. But this elementary level of information is
not sufficient for a modern democracy. It isn't sufficient to read newspapers
(a sin against Jeffersonian democracy), and it isn't sufficient to achieve
economic fairness and high productivity. Cultural literacy lies above the
everyday levels of knowledge that everyone possesses and below the expert
level known only to specialists. It is that middle ground of cultural knowledge
possessed by the common reader.' It includes information that we have
traditionally expected our children to receive in school, but which they
no longer do.

During recent decades Americans have hesitated to make a decision about
the specific knowledge that children need to learn in school. Our elementary
schools are not only dominated by the content neutral ideas of Rousseau and
Dewey, they are also governed by approximately sixteen thousand independent
school districts. We have Newell this dispersion of educational authority
as an insurmountable obstacle to altering the fragmentation of the school
curriculum even when we have questioned Fat fragmentation. We have permitted
school policies that have shrunk the body of information that Americans
share, and these policies have caused our national literacy to decline.

At the same time we have searched with some eagerness for causes such
as television that lie outside the schools. But we should direct our attention
undeviatingly toward what the schools teach rather than toward Emily structure,
social class, or TV programming No doubt, reforms outside the schools are
important, but they are harder to accomplish. Moreover, we leave accumulated
a great deal of evidence that faulty policy in the schools is a chief cause
of inefficient literacy. Researchers who have studied the factors influencing
educational outcomes have fount that the school curriculum is the most important
controllable influence on what our children know and don't know about our
literate culture.

It will not do to blame television for the state of our literacy. Television
watching does reduce reading and often encroaches on homework. Much of it
is admittedly the intellectual equivalent of junk food. But in some respects,
such as its use of standard written English, television watching is acculturative. Moreover, as Herbert Walberg points out, the schools themselves must be held partly responsible for excessive television watching, because they have not firmly insisted that students complete significant amounts of homework an obvious way to increase time spent on reading and writings Nor should our schools be excused by an appeal to the effects of the decline of the family or the vicious circle of poverty, important as these factors arc. Schools have,
or should have, children for six or seven hours a day, five daters a week,
nine months a year, for thirteen years or more. To assert that they are
powerless to make a significant impact on what heir students learn would be
to make a claim about American education that few parents, teachers, or
students would find it easy to accept.

Just how fragmented the American public school curriculum has become is
evident in The Shopping Mall High School, a report on five years of firsthand study inside public and private secondary schools. The authors report that our high schools offer courses of so many kinds that 'the word 'curriculum'
does not to justice to its astonishing variety.' The offerings include
not only academic courses of diversity, but also courses in sports and
hobbies and a 'service curriculum' addressing emotional or social
problems. All these courses are deemed 'educationally valid' and
carry course credit, Moreover, among academic offerings are numerous versions
of each subject, corresponding to different levels of student interest and
ability. Needless to say, the material covered in these 'content area'
courses is highly variedly Cafeteria style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly shared information between generations and between young people themselves. Those who graduate from the same school have often studied different subjects, and those who graduate from different schools
have often studied different material even when their courses have carried
the same titles.

The inevitable consequence of the shopping mall high school is a lack
of shared knowledge across and within schools. It would be hard to invent
a more effective recipe for cultural fragmentation.

Any formalistic educational theory behind the shopping mall school (tie
theory that any suitable content will inculcate reading, writing, and thinking
skills) has had certain political advantages for school administrators.
It has allowed titan to stay scrupulously neutral with regard to contents
Educational formalism enables them to regard the indiscriminate variety of
school offerings as a positive virtue, on the grounds that such variety can
accommodate the different interests and abilities of different students.
Educational formalism has also conveniently allowed school administrators
to meet objections to the traditional literate materials that used to be taught in the schools. Objectors have said that traditional materials are class bound,
white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, not to mention racist, sexist, and excessively
Western. Our schools have tried to offer enough diversity to meet these
objections from liberals and enough Shakespeare to satisfy conservatives.
Caught between ideological parties, thy schools have been attracted irresistibly
to a quantitative and formal approach to curriculum-making rather than one
based on sound judgments about what should be taught. Some have objected
that teaching the traditional literate culture means teaching conservative
material. Orlando Patterson answered that objection when he pointed out
that mainstream culture is not the province of any single social group and
is constantly changing by assimilating new elements and expelling old ones. Although mainstream culture is tied to the written word and may therefore
seem more formal and elitist than other elements of culture, that is an illusion.
Literate culture is the most democratic culture in our land: it excludes
nobody; it cuts across generations and social groups and classes; it is not
usually one's first culture, but it should be everyone's second, existing
as it does beyond the narrow spheres of family, neighborhood and region.

As the universal second culture, literate culture has some the common
currency for social and economic exchange in our democracy, and the only available
ticket to hill citizenship. Getting one's membership cart is not tied to class
or race. Membership is. automatic if one learns the background information
and the linguistic conventions that are needed to read, write and speak effectively.
Although everyone is literate in some local, regional, or ethnic culture
tile connection Sheen mainstream culture and the national written age justifies
Balling mainstream culture the basic culture of the nation.

The claim that universal cultural literacy would have the effect of preserving
the political and social status quo is paradoxical because in fact the traditional
forms of literate culture are precisely the most effective instruments for
political and social change. All political discourse at the national level
must use the stable forms of the national language and its associated
culture, Take the example of The Black Panther, a radical and revolutionary
newspaper if ever this country hat one. Yet the Panther was highly conservative
in its language and cultural assumptions, as it had to be in order to communicate effectively. What could be more radical in sentiment but more conservative in language and assumed knowledge than the following passages from that paper?

The present period revcals the criminal growdl of bourgeois democracy
since the betrayal of those who died that this nation nught live 'free
and indivisible.' It deposes through the trial of the Chicago Seven,
and its law and order edicts, its desperate turn toward the establishment
of a police state. January 17, 1970)

In this land of 'milk and honey,' the 'almighty dollar'
rules supreme and is being upheld by the hidil troops who move flout question
in the name of 'law and order.' Only in this garden of hypocnsy
and inequality can a murderer not be considered a murderer-only here can
innocent people be charged with a critne and be talcca to court with the
confessed Criminal testifying apinst Gem. Incredible? (March 28, 1970)

In the United States, the world's most technologically advanced country, one million youths Tom tz to I7 years of age are illiterate-unable to teat
as well as the average fourth grater, says a new government report Why
so much illiteracy in a land of so much Icnowledgc? The answer is because
there is racism. Blacks and other Nonwhites receive the worst education.
(May I8, I974)

The last item of the Black Pandler Party platform, issued Mard ^9, I97X,
by

WE WANT LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people
to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with one another,
and to assume among the powers of the card the separate and equal suiion
to which the laws of nature and nature's Law entitle them, a decent respect
to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes
which unpeg them to the separation.

And so on for the first fivc hundred of Jcfferson's words without the
least hint, or need of one, that this is a vcrbaim repetition of an earlier
revolutionary declaration. Ike writers for The Bkzck Panffia had clearly
~~vet a rigorous traditional education in' American history, in the Dcclaradon
of Independence, tic Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, the Gettysburg Address,
and the Bible, to mention only some of the direa quotations and allusions
in these passages. They also received rigorous traditional instruction in
reading, wriing, and spelling. I have not found a single misspelled word
in the many pages of radical sentiment I have exalrined in that newspaper.

Radicalism in politics, but conservatism in literate knowledge and spelling:
to be a conservatism in the means of communication is the road to effectiveness
in modern life, in whatever direction one wishes to be effective.

To withhold tradiuonal culture from the school curriculum, and therefore
from students, in the name of progressive ideas is in fact an unprogressive
action that helps preserve the political and.economic status quo. Middle-class
children acquire mainstream literate culture by daily encounters with other
literate persons. But less privileged children are teniet consistent interchanges
vitb literate persons and fail to receive dxiis information in spool. The
most straightforward antidote to their deprivation is to make the essential
information more readily available inside the schools.

Providing our children with traditional information by no means indoctrinates
them in a consenadve point of view. Conservatives who vesh to presene traditional
valua will End that these are not necessarily inculcated by a traditional
education, which can in hat be subversive of the status quo. As a child
of deven, I turned against the conservative views of my Emily and the Southern
community in which I grew up, precisdy because I had been given a traditional
education and was therefore literate enough to read Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, an epoch-making book in my life.

Although teaching children national mainstream culture doesn't mean hreing
them to accept its valua uncritically, it does enable them to understand
those valua in order to predict the typical attitudes of other Americans.
The writers for The Black Panther dearly understood this when they quoted
the Declaration of Independence. George Washington, for instance, is a name
in our received culture that we associate with the truthfulness of the hero
of the story of the cherry tree. Americans should be taught that value associadon,
whether or not they believe the story. Far from accepting the cherrytree
tale or its implicadons, Oscar Wilde in 'The Decay of Lying' used
it ironically, in a way that is probably funnier to Americans than to the
British audience he was addressing.

[Truth telling is] vulgarizing mankind. The crude commercialism of America,
its materializing spirit, its indifference to the poetical site of things,
and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely
due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according
to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too
much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree has
done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale
in the whole of literature.... And the amusing part of the whole thing is
that the story of the cherry tree is an absolute myth.

For us no less than for Wilde, the values affirmed in traditional literate
culture can serve a whole spectrum of value attitudes. Unquesdonably, decisions
about techniques of conveying traditions to our children are among the most
sensitive and important decisions of a pluralistic nadon. But the complex
problem of how to teach values in American schools mustn't distract attention
from our fundamental dub to teach shared content.

The failure of our schools to create a literate society is sometimes
excused on the grounds that the schools have been asked to do too much.
They are asked, for exarnple, to pay due regard to the demands of both local
and national acculturadon. They are asked to teach not only American history
but also suite and city history, driving, cardiopulmonary resuscitation,
consumerism, carpentry, cooking, and other special subjects. They are given
the task of teaching information that is sometimes too rudimentary and somedmes
too specialized. If the sdhools did not undertake this instrucdon, much
of the information so provided would no doubt go unlearned. In some of our
national moods we would like the schools to teadh everything, but they cannot.
There is a pressing need for dadty about our educational pdoddes.

As an example of the priorities we need to set, consider the teadling
of local history in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Suppose Virginians had
to choose between learning about its native son Jeb Stuart and Abraham Lincoln.
The example is arbitrary, but since choices have to be made in education,
we might consider the two names emblematic of the kind of pdodty decision
that has to be made. Educadonal policy always involves choices between degrees
of worthiness.

The concept of cultural literacy helps us to make such decisions because
it places a higher value on national than on local informadon. We want to
make our children competent to communicate with Amedcans throughout the
land. Therefore, if Virginians did have to decide between Stuart and Lincoln
they ought to favor the man from Illinois over the one from Virginia. A11
literate Amedcans know traditional information about Abraham Lincoln but
reladvely few know about Jeb Stuart. To become literate it's therefore more
important to know about Lincoln than about Stuart. The priority has nothing
to to with inherent merit, only with the accidents of culture. Stuart certainly
hat more medt than Benedict Arnold did, but Arnold also should be given
educational priority over Stuart. Why? Because Bcnetia Arnold is as much
a part of our national language as is, saj,Jydas.

To tescdbc Benedict Arnold and Abraham Lincoln as belonging to the national
language discloses another way of conceiving cultural literacy-as a vocabulary
that we are able to use throughout the land because we share associations
with others in our society. A universally sharer national vocabulary is
analogous to a universal currency like the dollar. Of course tic vocabulary
consists of more than justwords. BcnedictArnold is part of national cultural
literacy; eggs Benedict isn't.

THE CRITICAL IMPORTANCE OF EARLY SCHOOLING

Once we become aware of tic inherent connection between literacy and
cultural literacy, we have a duty to those who lack cultural literacy to
determine and disclose its contents. To someone who is unaware of the things
a literate person i expected to know, a writer's assumption that raters
possess cultural literacy could appear to be a conspiracy of tic literate
against the illiterate, for the purpose of keeping them out of the club.
But there is no conspiracy. Wdters must make assumptions about the body
of information their readers know. Unfortunately for tic disadvantaged,
no one ever spells out wb at tb at information iv But, u tic Appendix illustrate,
tic total quandry of commonly shared information that the schools need to
impart is less taunting than one might think, for tic crucial background
knowledge possessed by literate people is, as I have pointed out, telegraphic,
vague, and lisnited in extent.

Preschool is not too early for starting earnest instruction in literate
national culture. Fifth grade is alsnost too late. Tenth grate usually is
too late. Anyone who is kepdcal of this assertion should take a look at
a heterogeneous class of slfthgratcrs engaged in sumnarizing a piece they
have rcat. There are predictable tiffercnca between tic summaries given
by children with culturally adequatc backgrounds and those given by children
widhout. Aldhougb disadvantaged children often show an acceptable ability
to decode and pronouna individual words, they are frequendy unable to gain
an integrated sense of a piece as a whole. They miss central isnplicadons
and associations because they don't possess tale background knowledge necessary
to put the text in context. Hearing they hear not, and seeing they do not
understand.

Ya if you observe a kindergarten or slrstgrade class in which pupils
have the same diversity of family background, you will not find a similar
spread in the wading performances of pupils strom different social classes.
Disadvantaged firstgraders do as well as middle class ones in sounding out
letters and simple words.a' What happens between frst grade and fifth grade
to change d c equality of perforrnanect The isnpKssion that something significant
has occurred or has failed to occur isi ticsc early grades is confirmcd
by international comparisons of reading attainment at early ages in different
countncs. Before grade dared when reading skills are more mechanical than
intcrpredvc, the United States stands in dye top group of countries. Later,
when reading requires an understanding of more complex content, our comparative
ranking drops.2' Aldbougb our ssbools do comparadvdy well in teaching elementary
decoding skills, deny do less wdl dban schools of some odher countrics in
teaching the background knowEdgc dbat pupils must possess to succeed at
mature reading tasks.

Tile importance of this evident for isnproving our national literacy
can scarcely be overemphasized. If in the early grades our children were
taught texts with cultural content rather than 'developmcntal'
texts that devdop abstract skills, much of the specific knowledge defidt
of disadvantaged children could be overcome For it is clear that one critical
difference in the reading performances of disadvantaged fifthgraders as
compared with advantaged pupils is the difference in their cultural knowledge.
Background knowledge does not take care of itself. Reading and writing are
cumulative skills; the more we read the more necessary knowledge we gain
for further reading.

Around grade four, those who lack the initial knowledge required for
significant reading begin to be left behind permanently. Having all too
slowly built up their cultural knowledge, they find reading and learning
increasingly toilsome, unproductive, and humiliadng. It follows that teaching
cultural information in the early grades would do more than just improve
the reading performance of all our children. By removing one of the causes
of failure, it would especially enhance the modvadon, selfesteem, and performance
of disadvantaged children.

Really effective reforms in the teaching of cultural literacy must therefore
begin with the earliest grades. Every improvement made in teaching very
young children Utcrate background information will have a multiplier effect
on later learning, not just by virtue of the information thug will gain
but also by virtue of the greater motivation for reading and learning they
will fed when they actually understand what they have read.

Young children enjoy absorbing formulaie knowledge. Even if they did
not, our society would sdll find it essential to tack them all sorts of
tradlidons and facts. Cddcal thinking and basic skills, two areas of current
focus in educadon, do not enable children to create out of their own imaginations
the essential names and concepts that have arisen by historical accident.
The Rio Grands, the MasonDixon One, 'The Night Before Christmas,'
and Star Wars are not products of basic skills or critical thought. Many
items of literate culture are arbitrary, but that does not make them dispen
sable. Facts are essential components of the basic skills that a child entering
a culture must havc.

I'm not suggesdng that we teach our children exactly what our grandparents
learned. NVc should teach children current mainstream culture. It's obvious
that tic content of cultural literal changes over the years. Today the term
'Brown decision' belongs to cultural literal but in t94S ticrc
hadn't been any Brown decision. Tbc name Harold Ickes was current in t94S
but no longer is. Susb mutability is the fate of most names and events of
recent history. Other changes come through tic contributions of various
subnadonal cultures. Ethnic words (Idle pizza) and art forms (like jazz)
are constantly entering and departing from mainstream culture. Other subnadonal
cultures, including those of science and technology, also cause changes
in the mainstream culture. DNA and quarks, now part of cultural literal
were unknown in I94ffi. In short, terms that literate people know in the
tg805 are different from those they knew in 1945, and forty years hence
the literate culture will again be different.

The flux in mainstream culture is obvious to all. But stability, not
change, is the chief characteristic of cultural literal Although historical
and technical terms may follow the ebb and flow of events, the more stable
elements of our national vocabulary, like George Washington, the tooth fairy,
the Gettysburg Address, Hamlet, and the Declaration of Independence, have
persisted for a long dme. These stable elements of the national vocabulary
are at the core of cultural literacy, and for that reason are the most important
contents of schooling. Although the terms that ebb and flow are tremendously
important at a given dmc, they belong, from an educadonal standpoint, at
the periphery of literate culture. The persistent, stable demerits bdong
at the educational core.

Let me give some concrete examples of the kinds of core informadon I
mean. American readers are assumed to have a general knowledge of the following
people (I give just the beginning of a list): John Adams, Susan B. Anthony,
Benedict Arnold, Danid Boone, John Brown, Aaron Burr, John C. Calhoun, Henry
Clay, James Fcnimorc Cooper, Lord Cornwallis, Davy Crockett, Emily Dickinson,
Stephen A. Douglas, Frederick Douglass, Jonadhan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Benjamin Franklin, Robert Pulton, Ulysses S. Grant, Alexander Hamilton,
and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Most of us know rather little about these people,
but dhat litde is of crucial importance, because it enables writers and
speakers to assu no a starting point from which they can treat in detail
what dhey wish to focus on.

Here is another alphabedcal Ust that no course in critical thinking skills,
however masterful, could ever generate: Antarctic Ocean, Arctic Ocean, Adandc
Ocean, Baltic Sea, Black Sea, Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, North Sea,
Pacific Ocean, Red Sea. It has a companion list: Alps, Appalachians, Himalayas,
Matterhorn, Mount Everest, Mount Vesuvius, Rocky Mountains. Because literate
people mention such names in passing, usually without explanation, children
should acquire them as part of their intellectual equipment.

Children also need to understand elements of our literary and mythic
heritage that are often alluded to Without explanation, for example, Adam
and Eve, Csun and Abel, Noah and the Flood, David and Goliath, the Twentytbird
Psalm, Humpty Dumpty,Jack Sprat, Jack and Jill, Little Jack Homer, Cinderella,
Jack and the Beanstalk, Mary had a little lamb, Peter Pan, and Pinocchio.
Also Achilles, Adonis, Aeneu, Agamemnon, Antigone, and Apollo, u well as
Robin Hood, Paul Bunyan, Satan, Sleeping Beauty, Sodom and Gomorrah, the
Ten Commandments, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Our current distaste for memorizatdon is more pious than realistic. At
an early age when their memoda are most retentive, childKn have an almost
instinctive urge to learn specific tdbal traditions. At that age they seem
to be fascinated by catalogues of information and are eager to master the
materials that authantdcate their membership in adult society. Observe for
example how they memorize the rather complex materials of football, baseball,
and basketball, even without benefit of formal avenues by which that information
is inculcated.

The weight of human traditdon across many cultures supports the view
that buic acculturation should largdy be completed by age thirteen. At that
age Catholia are confirmed, Jews bar or bat mitzvahet, and tdbal boys and
girls undergo the dta of passage into the tribes According to the anthropological
record, all cultures whose educational methods have been reported in the
Human Rclattons Area Fibs (a standard source for anthropological data) have
used early memodzation to carry on their tradidons.'

In Korea, 'numerous books must be memodzed, including the five Kyung,
and the four Su.' In Tibet, 'from tight to ten years of age, the
boy spends most of his time reading aloud and memorizing the scriptures.'
In Chile, the Araucanian Indians use the memodzadon of songs as an educational
technique to teach 'the subtleties of the native tongue, and an insight
into the customs and traditions of their tribe.' In southern Africa,
the children of tic Kung bushmen listen for hours to discussions of which
they understand very little until they 'know the history of every object,
every exchange betwecn their familia, before they are ten or twelve years
old.' In Indonesia, 'mcmorizadon is tic method commonly used.'
In Thailand, children 'repeat their lasons until they know them by
heart.' In Arizona, the Papago Indians take children through the lengthy
rituals 'as many times as needed for the learner to say it all through,
which may take a year.'30

The new kind of teaching espoused by Rousseau and Dewey, which avoids
row learning and encourages the natural development of the child on analogy
with the development of an acorn into an oak, has one virtue certainly:
it encourages independence of mind. But the theory also has its drawbacks,
one of which is that a child is not in fact like an acorn. Left to itself,
a child will not grow into a thriving creature; Tarzan is pure fantasy.
To thrive, a child needs to learn the traditions of the particular human
society and culture it is born intone Like children everywhere, American
children need traditional information at a very early age.

A great deal is at stake in understanding and acting on this essential
perception as soon as possible. The opportunity of acquiring cultural literacy,
once lost in the early grades is usually lost for good. That is most likely
to be true for children of parents who were not themselves taught the literate
national culture.

In the technological age, Washington and the cherry tree, Scrooge and
Christmas, the fights historical, the oceans geographical, the 'beings
animalculus,' and all the other shared materials of literate culture
have become more, not less, important. The more computers we have, thc more
we need shared Airy tales, Greek myths, historical images, and so on. That
is not really the paradox it seems to be. The more specialized and technical
our civilization becomes, the harder it is for nonspecialists to participate
in the decisions that deeply affectt their lives. If we do not achicyc a
literate society, the technicians, with their arcane specialdes, will not
be able to communicate with us nor we with them. That would contradict the
basic principles of democracy and must not be allowed to happen.

The antidote to growing spedalizadon is to reinvigorate the unspecialized
domain of literate discourse, where all can meet on common ground. That
this ideal can be achieved is proved by such admirable writers as Theodore
H. White, John Kenneth Galbraith, Lewis Thomas, Peter Medawar, and Richard
Feynman, who are able to communicate their complex expertise to a wide audience
of educated people. We will h able to achieve a just and prosperous society
only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared badeground
knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with everyone else.